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The Girl Who Knew Too Much (A GetDPI member Kickstarter plug)

(Mods, please remove if this is not appropriate here.)

Howdy all,

This won't be everyone's cup of tea, but this forum has been pretty important to me. Though I'm generally pretty quiet here, I'm grateful to Guy and Jack for hosting it and for making it a respectful, intelligent resource. Over last several years, I have popped in here from time to time to the forum about a do-gooder project that I'm involved in.

For those interested, a bit of background: This project started off back in 2008, with my wife and me producing a promo-doc for a nonprofit that gives scholarships to poor girls in Nepal.

IN the course of shooting that first piece, we identified one particular girl who was just amazing--fiercely intelligent and determined to take the opportunity and break away from her untouchable caste status and generational poverty.

We resolved to make a feature documentary about this girl, and this subject. But before we could return to Nepal, we found out that our 'star'--Shanta--had killed herself. We were devastated, and then flabbergasted to learn that suicide has become the number one cause of death among girls and women in Nepal (and likely elsewhere in South Asia as well).

At this point, our film's future was up in the air, but we returned to Nepal to begin trying to figure out what happened. Along the way our do-gooder documentary sort of morphed into the investigation of a case of wrongful death.

We have enjoyed exceptional access to the principals, and have recorded some remarkably intimate footage. We have a heck of a story on our hands, and we feel the responsibility to get it done.

We still believe very strongly in supporting development efforts, but we want to make a film that will help illuminate the complexities of Western 'helping' in developing countries. It's just not as simple as we want it to be; throwing money at problems can do harm as well as good.

Amy and I have mounted a Kickstarter campaign to fund our final production push on the film--a return trip in early 2013, and if you are so inclined, please go and have a look.

We have met our Kickstarter funding floor, but our true goal is around twice the amount we posted (we need $60,000 to do this right)--we were afraid of being over-ambitious and losing funding because of the all-or-nothing nature of Kickstarter. The process taught us that our subject matter IS compelling, and that there ARE a lot of people who believe in what we're doing. It's been a big education.

If you view the Kickstarter video and like what you see, of course I hope you'll consider pledging to the campaign. The money will ALL go to support making this film as good as possible, and reaching as many people as possible.

But more important than that even is sharing the word. Any way you can get the project's Kickstarter or Facebook links out into your networks will help us build audience and raise awareness.

We welcome any and all comments, questions, or constructive criticism of the material linked here.

Now we return you to your regularly scheduled gearhead anguish/blissout. LOVE this place. It's a good time to be a gearhead!